Meet Mr. Super Bowl

Michael Kelly carrying the ball for Jacksonville

By David DeCampTimes-Union staff writer,

For a guy with the weight of Jacksonville's Super Bowl on his shoulders, Michael Kelly doesn't stand out much.

At 6-foot-1, medium built and easygoing, he almost wafts through the cocktail meetings that Super Bowl organizers have. While big shots work the room, he seems to blend into the background. Says hello so wholesomely. Soft-spoken nearly to a fault sometimes.

He might seem like a wallflower, but Kelly -- the new chief of Jacksonville's 2005 Super Bowl -- was hired because his reputation is that he gets the job done.

This week, Kelly, 31, took over as president and chief operating officer of the Jacksonville Super Bowl Host Committee, leaving a job as associate athletic director for the University of South Florida. His job will be to carry out the local leadership's ideas for creating a waterfront plaza using cruise ships as hotels, and making sure all other projects and events run like clockwork for the National Football League's premier event. He will be paid about $150,000 a year for a three-year commitment.

"It's not so much that I have to tell Jacksonville how to run it but to be able to run it the way the NFL wants it, which is what we intend," Kelly said.

The local event's top brass -- departing president Mike Weinstein, co-chairmen Peter Rummell and Tom Petway, who also will be chief executive officer, and Jaguars owner Wayne Weaver -- first began a long recruitment of Kelly 18 months ago. He was their top choice.

Kelly is widely lauded for his successful resume of running the 1999 men's college basketball Final Four in St. Petersburg and the 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa. With a knack for to-do lists and a tidy office, his simple nature and structured attention to detail makes him a find, local leaders say.

The previous two events were challenging career notches. The 2005 Super Bowl, however, carries the weight of unveiling small-market Jacksonville as a potential big-time player to a global audience.

Experience: executive director, 2001 Super Bowl in Tampa and 1999 men's college basketball Final Four in St. Petersburg. Director of athletic operations and facilities management, Wake Forest, 1995-98.

He will engineer more than envision. Much of the big picture, like cruise ships, comes from the NFL and the four top leaders of Jacksonville's host committee. Kelly will have to make sure the plumbing works.

"Michael is the perfect implementer," Weinstein said.

While planning the Tampa Super Bowl, organizers and the league found Kelly to be someone who solved problems. In the months approaching the game, for example, event vice chairman Leonard Levy and Kelly met with city officials about hosting a major fan gala at the convention center. But parking was in short supply for volunteers there.

As they left the meeting, Levy recalled, he turned to Kelly and threw out the idea of using the Florida Aquarium lot for parking, then shuttle volunteers to the center. Levy said that two days later he asked Kelly if he'd given it any thought.

"It's a done deal," Kelly told Levy.

"He exudes confidence in what he's doing," Levy said last week. "When Michael says something, he's given it a lot of thought."

However, the Tampa experience wasn't all rosy. One blemish was the traffic hassles. Crossing Tampa Bay at times caused long waits for residents and visitors. Saturday night before the game, the city put on its Gasparilla Festival, drawing 500,000 people downtown and creating a massive traffic jam.

There are parallels to that in Jacksonville. The city and its regional base of hotels are spread out, and organizers plan to concentrate major events downtown. While he cannot build roads, Kelly said this time he'll get the message out to visitors to find alternate ways to drive about town.

Local organizers say that attention to detail will be an asset for Jacksonville. The Super Bowl tends to have a lot of groups interested in a piece of its pie, sometimes with competing agendas.

Kelly has learned to balance those interests, said Bill Hancock, who runs the Final Four for the NCAA. He got to know Kelly from the 1999 tournament after Kelly -- when he was Wake Forest University's athletic facilities and operations director -- managed first- and second-round games two years earlier.

"Michael's able to focus in on the end product," Hancock said. "That's the magic of Michael. He doesn't need to be center stage. He lets others do that."

Kelly also has polished away some of the faults. No longer does his quiet intensity develop into nervousness, causing him to throw up before a big game or test. That went away in college, where he studied politics at Wake Forest with an eye on a law career or being a sports agent. He then went to St. Thomas University in Miami and a sports management career took shape.

Disciplined approach

By then, Kelly's approach to work had been established, dating to the seventh grade at a military school in Maryland. His father, a Navy veteran and International Monetary Fund administrator, went there. So did his grandfather.

In fact, Kelly became a lot more disciplined, making straight A's and playing hoops, he and his parents said. He followed the Washington Redskins and, particularly, Georgetown basketball.

His mother, Suzanna Kelly, remembers driving him and some basketball buddies one evening when their teenage chatter turned to the dreaded hours they spent on homework. One friend asked Michael how long homework took him.

"Until it's done," she heard him say.

"My mom told me, you can keep playing basketball as long as you keep getting straight A's. So I never challenged her," Kelly said recently. (For the record, Mom said she would have let him play with a B.)

But he made the grades. At college, he met the woman who became his wife, Lisa, an educator. They now have a baby girl, Cara.

When they were dating a decade ago, he gave his future wife a dose of his attention to detail. Kelly provided directions and gave her the exact change for tolls through Virginia when Lisa first drove to Maryland to visit him and his family, His attentiveness showed up again when he got ready to move from Tampa last month. Ever the organizer, he sent his father a detailed, three-week itinerary of his plans, and where everybody was supposed to be.

"He likes to have all his i's dotted and t's crossed. He's a little bit anal, I guess," his father, Dennis, said. "But that's a part of his success."

Staff writer David DeCamp can be reached at (904) 359-4699 or at ddecamp@jacksonville.com.